Stalking creativity

Having an archivist’s mind and curator’s soul are important to any creative process.

A month back, I got my hands on the year’s calendar by The Doodlers. What fascinated me, about their art was a light-hearted wickedness they brought to their sketches. Furthermore, there was an unprecedented level of chaos and an undifferentiated interception of shapes and stories.

Such a beautiful art announced itself to distracting levels. So I listened to my hunch and decided to let our readers in on the creative minds behind these beautiful illustrations.

Neha and her creative partners Sameer Kulkarni and Abhijit Kalan, give us a sneak peek into the idea incubation and a drooling list of their tools of mass creation.

What do you feel when you stare at a blank page, before your illustrations take shape on the whiteness of the sheet?

The feeling is a combination of excitement, nervousness, sudden enthusiasm for exploration, inquisitive thoughts around discovery of something unexpected and many a times just plain challenging.

The mind is not always clear about what has to be done. Sometimes, there’s just an idea. Sometimes, there’s just a style or technique of illustrations in thoughts. Most of the times, there’s just a subject in mind. And of course, a lot of times there’s absolutely nothing in mind.

If someone issues a search warrant through your tools and sketchbooks, what are they likely to stumble into?

Like many art-loving people, we are suckers for stationery. Given a chance to spend a fortune in one night, it would be either for stationery, books or toys. While sketching, we are peculiar about our tools. Depending on the kind of illustration needed, the tools change. Some of the brands/products we LOVE are:

And the reason we use a sketchbook is because it helps us define our sketches. Umm, not like we don’t sketch on separate sheets, but using a sketchbook just makes it more accessible and it keeps giving us a gentle reminder that we need to fill it up even more.

There isn’t any particular sketchbook brand that we use. What matters is the quality of paper should be great (especially if using Rotring pen on it), the grip should be good enough and size should be decently portable.
We have been buying sheets from paper marts and binding them as sketch books for the longest time. Now, we are experimenting with brands like Moleskin; but honestly, we find it expensive.

One local Indian brand of sketchbook that we recently discovered while making The Doodlers calendar was: Matrix Artist Pad. Typical art paper which has great GSM and quality.

What do you love sketching, just for fun?

We have more sketches that are personal/unreleased than ones done for larger projects. Basically sketching has been an inevitable part of our lives, unknowingly; until one day we realised that we should actually start publishing it.
Abhijit is extremely fond of sketching crows. In fact, he discovered his love for illustrations through his signature crows. He has created over 150 unique crows until now and I think the number will be never-ending. Apart from that, he has also sketched a series of elephants and other many random illustrations.

Sameer is brilliant with caricatures, sketches that involve perspective, animated character illustrations and doodles. He is very fluent at doodling on walls with his marker. He also likes to experiment with different stationery and tools while sketching through which unique styles come out.

And me (Neha), well I am obsessed with drawing lady-figures. My mom said that I was 3 or 4 years old when I started drawing them. It has become a habit that sketching eyes, hair and eventually a face of a woman is the first thing that will come out if I am given a pencil in my hand. There’s something about woman’s anatomy that fascinates me.